And there we are, the KDE team has released KDE Software Compilation 4.4, formerly known as, well, KDE. Major new features include social networking and online collaboration integration, the new netbook interface, the KAuth authentication framework, and a lot more.

Fedora 13 is due for release 2010-May-11, and that may suit as Fedora normally has a fairly reasonable KDE implementation, but it is not the default since Fedora is primarily a GNOME distribution. Perhaps Mandriva would be more to your liking.

OpenSuse normally has a good KDE desktop implementation as the default, and that is due 2010-July-15, but given its association with Suse there is some danger it may try to include Mono, so beware.

You can certainly download programs for SuSe Linux, that isn't scary at all. However, you can also download programs for Fedora or Mandriva, even without Mono installed, so that is not a real differentiator.

Microsoft does have a campaign to try to eliminate Linux, however, and one of their "weapons" is patents and another is their assertion that if they are first to market with a certain type of technology (as an example, say LAN networking) and they have kept that technology a trade secret, then despite what the law says Microsoft like to pretend that no-one else may implement interoperable software without paying royalties to Microsoft.

So, .NET includes some components that Microsoft have submitted as standards (e.g. C# itself), and it has other parts that Microsoft have kept as trade-secret Microsoft technologies (ASP.NET, ADO.NET and WinFroms are examples). This is not controversial, this is fact.

Microsoft want dearly to pretend that if anyone else implements technologies that Microsoft has kept as trade secrets, then they owe royalties to Microsoft.

Mono implements technologies that Microsoft has kept as trade secrets. Therefore, Microsoft will want to collect royalties from users of Mono, even though Microsoft did not write the Mono software.

Balmer is using double-speak when he talks about competition. He gives himself away when he points to "undisclosed liabilities" as the reason for investing in Suse rather than any other distribution. The "undisclosed liabilities" are really a threat of a lawsuit. Microsoft has put everyone on warning that they intend to sue other distributions and their users.

So, it follows that in order to avoid any possibility of such trouble, and to avoid giving Microsoft any semblance of a reason for lawsuits, it is very easy to just simply refuse to install anything resembling non-Microsoft implementations of Microsoft trade secret technologies.